Nuits d'été

Berlioz both admired Gautier as a poet and, since he was one of the few to express enthusiasm for Benvenuto Cellini on its disastrous first performance in 1838, welcomed him as a critic. So they must have been on the best of terms when, in 1840, Berlioz chose to set six poems from La comédie de la mort, grouping the songs under the collective title Les nuits d’été. While they do not add up to a cycle - not even, as has been claimed, as “variations on a theme of longing” - they belong naturally together, the effect of each one enhanced by the presence of the others. Villanelle is a teasingly sophisticated imitation of folk song in a deceptively simple strophic form but with considerable harmonic art hidden within it. Le Spectre de la rose is not unhappy either, sad though it is for the rose. Berlioz sets it almost as an operatic scena but never overdramatises it, least of all in the original voice-and-piano version.

Sur les lagunes is, on the other hand, a study in romantic longing. Its texture is permeated by a three-note sigh which finally enters the vocal line and dies away with it over harmonies that leave the song bereft even of a definitive ending. Absence explores much the same state of mind, as repeatedly expressed in the sorrowful opening line, while Au Cimetière is another elegy and an interesting illustration of Berlioz’s wisdom in resisting the temptation to match the richness of the poet’s language. In what is perhaps the most inspired of all Gautier settiings, L’Île inconnue, Berlioz almost but not quite restores the happy mood of the first song. The opening stanza, which returns in full and in part, is certainly carefree. But, after the devastatingly innocent request of the young beauty, its conviction melts away.